The Mistletoe Motive(8)
Smiling at the sound and feel of her rumbling purr as she settles back to sleep, I power on my laptop and bring the screen to life.
A photo of June, Eli, and me, huddled close, fills the screen. Eli grins, auburn ringlets falling over his eyes, which are squinted shut because the man can’t help but blink when his picture is taken. Glossy chin-length black hair, crinkled nose, wide smile, June has her arms hooked around our necks, temple to temple with Eli, smooshing my curls to my head as I kiss her cheek. Snow dusts our heads like confectioner’s sugar, the conservatory’s Winter Wonderland display a tapestry of intricate twinkling lights behind us.
Looking at the photo, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude—for loving parents who are good people, friends who are the siblings I never had, a faithful feline pet, a city that feels like home, a job that I love run by people I love even more. I have so much to be thankful for. And if my only true burden in this life—even if he is a very large, surly burden—is Jonathan Frost, I guess I can deal with that.
“Hey.”
I spin around to face June standing on the threshold of my room.
“You okay?” she asks. “I know we got a little intense back there about the work nemesis situation. I’m just protective of you. And Eli’s a hopeless romantic.”
“I know.” I smile. “I love you both for it. I’m fine. Just tired.”
She nods. “All right. Don’t stay up too late talking to Mr. Reddit.”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, Mom.”
Eli and June have admitted they don’t quite understand why I talk daily with someone I’ve never met, whose real name I don’t know, whose personal life I don’t know much about either, except that—smallest of worlds—we’ve figured out we live in the same city.
I could try to explain my relationship with Mr. Reddit, as June and Eli named him, but I’m protective of how great talking to him makes me feel. Behind the safety of a screen, I’m my most sophisticated self—articulate, witty, sharp. Mr. Reddit hasn’t seen me struggle to read his facial expressions or observed how often I wear my noise-cancelling headphones or learned how anxious I get when life veers off my routine. And listen, I love myself for who I am, every part of me, the parts that fit easily in this world and the parts that don’t, but it’s a whole other thing to ask someone else to love me for all of those parts, too.
I don’t show Mr. Reddit those parts that don’t fit so well, and in doing so, I don’t risk him rejecting them, either.
That’s the truth of why I don’t tell June and Eli more. I know how they’d see it. Eli would encourage me to embrace vulnerability. June would say the person who deserves me will be wild about all of me, otherwise they can fuck the fuck off.
And my friends would be right. But it’s easy for them to say. They don’t understand what pursuing friendship and romance is like for me, how being autistic and demisexual means not just the exposure of myself, like it is for anyone when they meet people and try to forge a connection, but weighing when and how to trust someone with the truth of who I am, a truth that’s not always been met with understanding or acceptance or kindness.
So I’ve kept Mr. Reddit to myself since we met, a little over a year ago on a bookish Reddit thread that got real heated when a guy started mansplaining George Orwell’s 1984, and another someone—that would be me—patiently, logically explained how wrong he was.
It went south fast. The guy started calling me nasty names.
And then in came What_The_Charles_Dickens like a total badass, cutting him off at the rhetorical knees. I mean, I didn’t need a Reddit knight in shining armor, but I wasn’t opposed to one. And thus began our online bookish friendship.
By unspoken agreement, What_The_Charles_Dickens, aka Mr. Reddit, and I talk only in the evenings on a chat platform, Telegram, that requires you to register with your phone number but allows you to show only your username. Knowing my propensity to hyper-focus, bordering on obsess, I’ve purposefully not downloaded the Telegram app on my phone, meaning I can only chat with him when I’m home on my computer.
Each night, after catching up with June and/or Eli, depending on their work schedules, then dinner and a shower, I settle in at my desk, Gingerbread on my lap, and wind down the day talking with Mr. Reddit. I’m a creature of habit, and he’s become a vital part of my routine. That’s why when I turn back to the screen and open up my Telegram desktop chat, my heart sinks. There’s no new message.
It’s rare that Mr. Reddit doesn’t leave a message for me. Since we started talking, it’s happened twice, and both times he later explained he’d been sick and unable to write.
I take a deep breath, try to exhale my disappointment, and scroll through yesterday evening’s chat between formerly What_The_Charles_Dickens, who switched his username to Mr. Reddit since I slipped about it being my roommate’s nickname for him, and MargaretCATwood, or as Mr. Reddit dubbed me, MCAT, because I can’t help myself. I start with his message that was waiting for me when I sat down last night.
MR. REDDIT: Can we talk about how Marianne Dashwood needs some deep-breathing exercises?
MCAT: She’s a hopeless romantic. She’s supposed to come across as a little dramatic.
He’s reading Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, because I gave him hell for only having read Pride and Prejudice.